Archive for May, 2016

Just as the Menendez brothers killed their parents and then demanded mercy from the court for being orphans, the Sanders team’s data people exploited a short-term vulnerability in a DNC server to create twenty-five lists of Hillary Clinton’s voter data – and then sued the DNC. (The alleged pretext was to force the DNC to restore Bernie’s team’s access to the servers, but funnily enough while the server access was restored within a few days, the suit was kept alive and used as a fundraising tool for the past few months, only being dropped this week.)

And just as O.J. Simpson claimed he was going to try and find “the real killers” of his ex-wife Nicole and Ron Goldman, the Sanders team claimed that it was trying to find the problem and accused the Clinton team and DNC of being “the real hackers” who also allegedly stole data from Bernie.

This has been shot down by people who actually know about IT matters. One of the most compelling testimonies is that of Aexia, who was the 2008 data director for Obama in Iowa. Here is the pertinent comment:

In 2008, when a similar vulnerability (of much less sensitive data) happened, Clinton staff immediately stopped what they were doing and reported it to VAN. They did exactly what they were supposed to and what the Sanders campaign did not. The Sanders then misrepresented this incident in their lawsuit to imply that the Clinton staff stole data and went unpunished.

I know because I was Obama’s Data Director in Iowa for the caucuses and believe me, if they had done anything out of line, we would’ve nailed them to the wall over it.

Aexia, in response to fellow Kossack Adam B, who is a friend of Josh Uretsky, one of the people who exploited the temporary vulnerability in the NGP-VAN server, also said this:

For all the people who might feel tempted to take Adam’s misguided-white-hat defense of Sanders’ national data director at face value. He pretty clearly notices what he has access to, escalates the privilege of his deputies, creates a dummy account and starts systematically running searches of target universes and saving lists (not searches) of the results to a folder under the dummy account.

There was no need to create dummy accounts if one was doing honest above-board testing.